Edge of Dark Water (25 page)

“Yes, sir. He killed two men that was working for Cletus, and caused another to get killed when a raft turned over on the river. The man on the raft was a preacher who tried to help us. His name was Reverend Jack Joy. He was an all-right fella.”

“My wife ran off with a preacher,” Captain Burke said. “So I don’t know I feel the loss all that heavy of a preacher.”

“We was running from Skunk. But he got his the other day. He’s dead by the river, hanging.”

“Hanging?” Captain Burke said.

I explained that part to him. When I finished up the story, I said, “What you going to do with my stepdaddy?”

“I don’t know,” Captain Burke said. “But your story and his kind of fit, except for the money.”

He kept coming back to the money, and by then I had him figured. He had already taken that ten dollars Jinx had put on his desk, folded it up, and put it in his shirt pocket.

“Cletus just thought there was money, but there wasn’t,” I said. “His boy, who died not long back. He spent it up. Word was he stole it from a bank.”

“Do say?”

“Yes, sir, that’s the story,” I said.

“So we can run all this by a judge if we like,” Captain Burke said. “But Don tells me Cletus ain’t got no next of kin to worry about things. Is that right?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “His whole family is deader than a doornail.”

“Well, then. You said this fella that was after you…Skunk. You said he’s dead and hanging?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “And Mama, and Terry, that boy with the one arm, they’re still in the cabin.”

I had told him this already, but he was a man that liked hearing a thing repeated, so I gave him his wish. I decided then to talk about how the old woman had died. I just mentioned before that she had cut Terry’s arm off cause it was bad infected, and that she had held us captive, but I hadn’t mentioned she had passed in her sleep. I told him now and told how Skunk had dug her up and we had left her leaning against the house.

When I finished, I wasn’t sure he believed all or any of our story, but he nodded at things while I talked, the way you will to someone you think may not have all their marbles.

When I finished with it, Captain Burke ran his hand through his hair, said, “We got pretty much a mess here, don’t we?”

Me and Jinx didn’t argue with that.

“What we going to do about it?” he asked.

We didn’t offer any words of wisdom.

“I guess I got to think on it before I decide,” he said. “First, though, I reckon we need to go get your mama and this Terry fella, and I want to see this Skunk, and that old woman you say you left leaning up against the house.”

I figured my criminal life was about to come to a bad end, but it didn’t work out quite like that.

Here’s what happened. Captain Burke hired a greasy trapper with three fingers missing (said a gator got them) and a motorboat; he motored us back up the river. Captain Burke looked silly sitting in the boat with his hat on, it being a ten-gallon. He had stuffed the inside of it with paper to make it fit, and it stood out from his noggin all the way around.

We stopped at where Skunk was hung up. They pulled the boat on shore enough so that it didn’t float away, got out, and stood there and looked at Skunk, who was even worse for wear than before. His neck had grown thin, and it was starting to rot.

Captain Burke got him a stick and poked Skunk a few times, causing him to swing back and forth. He poked him another time and darn if his head didn’t pop off, and let me tell you, that was a nasty sight.

“Who’d have thunk that there?” said the greasy trapper. “You’d think a head that big gonna have a neck that’s not gonna wear so quick, wouldn’t you?”

“He ain’t got no better neck than nobody else,” Captain Burke said.

“That there supposed to be that Skunk fella that comes to get folks and such?” the trapper asked, since Captain Burke—who, when it got right down to it, was kind of a blabbermouth—had told him the whole story.

“Yep,” I said.

“Ah, he don’t look like so much to me, he don’t. No, sir. Not so much.”

“Yeah, well,” Jinx said. “He ain’t alive. I don’t reckon the dead look like much no matter who they was.”

“Well, now,” said the trapper, “that’s a point you got there, it is. I’m just saying how he looks.”

They left Skunk where he fell, and we motored on up the river some more to where we had stopped when we first come to the old woman’s house. We went up the hill and to the house. I knocked on the door, and Mama answered it and let us in. Terry was able to get around better now, go to the outhouse proper, instead of going in a pan with the results thrown out one of the busted windows, as this was a thing he told us right away, right there in front of strangers. But I guess if I had had my arm cut off and had been having to do my business in a pan, I would have been pretty excited about the change as well. In the short time we had been gone, three days about, they had eaten up all the squirrels we had laid in, and the berries and grapes, too.

Captain Burke looked over Terry’s amputated arm and nodded his head at the work. “You say that a woman lived here done that?”

“Yes,” Terry said. “She’s leaning up against the house, with what’s left of my arm in a box.”

Mama went over and opened up the shutters, and there she was, still in the same place, but shrunk some in the blanket, and good and ripe, with that saw box still cradled and open on her forearms, the remains of Terry’s arm lying up in it.

“Uh-huh,” said the trapper, looking out the window. “I knowed this old woman some, a time back. She was like an old poison snake, but without the sweetness. Nobody had anything to do with her come these last ten years. She’d done got so sour wasn’t no one wanted anything to do with her. I thought she was done dead.”

Well, we buried the old woman again, and the trapper said a few words over her. About how she was mean as hell, but still she was dead and we ought to be polite, or some such thing. While he was talking I sort of drifted away, watching a blue jay in a tree.

Finished, we walked down to where Skunk was. The trapper and Captain Burke buried Skunk and his head in the side of the riverbank, which seemed foolish to me, as it wouldn’t be long before time washed him out of there. But to tell the truth, I didn’t really care. I wasn’t all that concerned about how Skunk had ended up, though there was moments when I’d consider how he had been treated when he was young; his tongue yanked out, hit over the head with a boat paddle, near drowned, and made to live in the woods. When I’d consider all that, I’d at least have a moment or two of some sad feelings for him. But they passed quicker than they came.

When they had Skunk buried, the trapper said to the bank where he had been tucked, “Good luck in hell,” then we walked back to where the boat was. It turned out the boat wasn’t big enough for all of us, which was a thing we had tried to tell Captain Burke from the start. But he had his mind set, so here we was. It was decided they’d take Mama and Terry to Gladewater, and it would be seen to that they got put up in a boardinghouse. Me and Jinx said we’d stay and wait our turn. When they was out of sight down the river, me and her went back up to the house and got the lard cans with the money and May Lynn’s ashes. We dug a hole near the briar patch and buried them, and made some little markers with rocks.

I guess it was near dark when Captain Burke and the trapper showed up, and we got loaded and made our way to Gladewater. Mama and Terry was over at the boardinghouse. Captain Burke went and got Mama but left Terry there, cause he was still feeling weak from all that blood loss. The trapper went away, and me and Jinx just waited around in the street until we seen Captain Burke and Mama coming our way.

Mama had had time to clean up and wash her hair, and she had been given a dress by the landlady; she looked good and fresh, and Captain Burke, like most men, was smitten.

When we all got to the jail, Mama went in back and talked with Don. When she came out, she said, “I talked to him like you suggested, Captain.”

“And?”

“He says he killed that man to keep him from having me and Sue Ellen killed. He said he doesn’t like Terry and doesn’t have any feelings for Jinx one way or the other.”

“Figures,” Jinx said.

Captain Burke looked at Mama. “Was he rough with you? Is that why you run off?”

Mama nodded. “Yes. Yes, he was, and that is why I ran off. But I think now he’s done. He was just trying to protect us in the end. It might not make him a good person, but it doesn’t make him evil. He was trying to do one thing right.”

That was our complete story. Reverend Joy didn’t come up again, and neither did Gene or Constable Sy. It didn’t seem to bother Captain Burke at all. None of the story we told would have been worth a damn for any solid law enforcement, even if it was mostly true, but Captain Burke seemed satisfied with it. I reckon when it comes to police matters, law is pretty much where and how you find it. And how much work there is to it for them, and how much money there is or isn’t in it.

In our case, there was too much work and no real money for Captain Burke, and at the bottom of it all, like lots of people in those kinds of positions, he didn’t really give a damn.

“I’ll cut him loose, then,” he said in a big way, spreading his hands. “We’ll call him killing that Cletus fella self-defense. Hell, we’ll just call everything even and not hurt our heads too much over it.”

“Sure,” Mama said, like any of it made sense.

Captain Burke told Mama he wouldn’t mind taking her to the café for dinner tomorrow if she was agreeable, and she said, “Maybe.”

Don was let loose, given his truck keys, wallet, and his greasy cap.

“Your truck is behind here,” Captain Burke said. “I think they buried that Cletus fella in the pauper’s section of the graveyard, if you or anyone cares. I guess being the shooter, you might not want to give him any prayers.”

Don looked in his wallet. It was empty. He said, “I had five dollars in there.”

“No, you didn’t,” Captain Burke said.

Don decided it was best to take the loss. He went outside, carrying his cap. When we went out he was waiting on us.

“I appreciate the way you helped me out in there, Helen,” he said to Mama. “I wouldn’t mind if you came home now.”

“You and I are divorced.”

“We wasn’t really never married by a preacher,” he said.

“That’s why we are divorced. Because I say so.”

“You wasn’t married?” I said.

“No,” Mama said.

“We just sort of took up together,” Don said.

“Mama,” I said. “What else ain’t you told me?”

But I didn’t say it like I really wanted to hear any kind of answer.

Don tried to sweet-talk her some, but Mama told him it was done, and she better not see him no more, or she would press charges with Captain Burke.

Don grinned at her. “I got a bottle of cure-all in the glove box of my truck, if Captain Burke didn’t drink it up. I know you must have been missing it. I’ll buy you another case soon as we get home and the trader comes around.”

“No more cure-all for me,” she said. “That’s what made me foolish. The river made me strong.”

“The river?” he said.

“Yes, the river. And these kids. And another one that isn’t here right now.”

“I saved your life,” he said. “I killed Cletus.”

“Cletus couldn’t find his elbow with a map,” she said. “You didn’t do anything to stop Skunk. Sue Ellen did that.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And that Sight you’re supposed to have hasn’t helped you much, has it? I don’t think you got any kind of future sight. I think you’re just a big donkey’s ass.”

I had been wanting to say something like that for a long time, and now it felt good to have done it.

Don glared at me.

“So you go on, now,” Mama said. “I won’t cry for Cletus, but Don, I won’t cry for you, neither. All I can say is I’m surprised you left the house and come this far. I’ll give you that.”

“I could take you home,” he said, acting a little bit tough. “I could make you.”

“I don’t think you can,” Helen said. “I’ll yell out for Captain Burke.”

“He ain’t going to be around all the time,” Don said.

“No, but he’s nearby right now,” she said. “And I am not afraid of you. You go get in your truck and you do what you want with your life, but I am done with you. I didn’t protect Sue Ellen like I should have, up there in that bedroom in my stupor. I’m protecting her now. I’d die before I’d let you touch her.”

“I didn’t mean nothing by that,” Don said. “I was just trying to compliment her.”

“You meant everything by it, and I should have stopped you,” Mama said. “If I see you around, I swear I’ll tell Captain Burke and say how I protected you with some lies but have changed my mind, and that you were in with Cletus to kill us and get the money.”

“Even though there ain’t no money,” I said.

“Yeah,” Mama said, picking up on what I was doing. “Even though there isn’t any money.”

“Cletus made that up on account of Jinx hitting him upside his head with a stick,” I said. “He wanted revenge.” Damn if I wasn’t getting to be a natural liar.

“And you did agree to have Sue Ellen hunted down and killed for seventy-five dollars,” Mama said. “I heard you agree to it.”

“I didn’t mean nothing by that,” he said. “Had I, I wouldn’t have killed Cletus. That’s just my way to talk like that. I wouldn’t have let nobody hurt Sue Ellen.”

“It’s your way that annoys me, Don,” Mama said. “You want me back so you can get me on the cure-all, keep me upstairs in that rotting house like a china-head doll. You won’t change. Never. You’ll hit me when you’re mad, then you’ll tell me how you didn’t mean it and you’ll change, but you won’t change. For all I know, one day you’ll do me like you did Cletus.”

Don studied Mama carefully to see if he could spot any weakness in her position, but there wasn’t any. He looked at me and Jinx. I stayed steadfast, and so did Jinx.

“You’ll regret it,” Don said. “You’ll miss me.”

“Haven’t so far,” Mama said. “I only helped you out here because you killed Cletus. That’s a murder you’re going to get away with. Now we’re all even, you and me, and we’re all done.”